The Cole Trilogy: The Physician, Shaman And Matters Of Choice Part 12

Hooting, their friends brought them each a cup of metheglin, which was quickly drained.

The blindfolded men drew their daggers.

The pig, which had been held at right angles to both of them, was now released to the floor. Immediately it tried to flee but, tethered as it was, it could only run in a circle.

"The little b.a.s.t.a.r.d comes, Dustin!" somebody shouted. The Englishman set himself and waited, but the sound of the animal's scurrying was drowned out by the shouts of the men, and the pig was past him before he knew it.

"Now, Vitus!" a Dane called.

In its terror the shoat ran straight into the Danish drover. The man stabbed at it three times without coming close, and it fled the way it had come, squealing.

Dustin could home in on the sound, and he came toward the shoat from one direction while Vitus closed in from the other.

The Dane took a swipe at the pig and Dustin drew a sobbing breath as the sharp blade sliced into his arm.

"You Northern f.u.c.k." He slashed out in a savage arc that didn't come near to either the squealing pig or the other man.

Now the pig darted across Vitus' feet. The Danish drover grasped the animal's rope and was able to pull the pig toward his waiting knife. His first stab caught it on the right front hoof, and the pig screamed.

"Now you have him, Vitus!"

"Finish him off, we eat him tomorrow!"

The screaming pig had become an excellent target and Dustin lunged toward the sound. His striking hand skittered off the shoat's smooth side and with a thud his blade was buried to his fist in Vitus' belly.

The Dane merely grunted softly but sprang back, ripping himself open on the dagger.

The only sound in the public house was the crying of the pig.

"Put the knife down, Dustin, you've done him," one of the Englishmen commanded. They surrounded the drover; his blindfold was ripped off and his tether was cut.

Wordlessly, the Danish drovers hurried their friend away before the Saxons could react or the reeve's men could be summoned.

Barber sighed. "Let us through to him, for we're barber-surgeons and may give him succor," he said.

But it was clear that there was little they could do for him. Vitus lay on his back as if broken, his eyes large and his face gray. In the gaping wound of his open stomach they saw that his bowel had been cut almost in half.

Barber took Rob's arm and drew him down to squat alongside. "Look on it," he said firmly.

There were layers: tanned skin, pale meat, a rather slimy light lining. The bowel was the pink of a dyed Easter egg, the blood was very red.

"It is curious how an opened-up man stinks far worse than any openedup animal," Barber said.

Blood welled from the abdominal wall and with a gush the severed bowel emptied itself of fecal matter. The man was speaking weakly in Danish, perhaps praying.

Rob retched but Barber held him close to the fallen man, like a man rubbing a young dog's nose in its own waste.

Rob took the drover's hand. The man was like a bag of sand with a hole in the bottom; he could feel the life running out. He squatted next to the drover and held his hand tightly until there was no sand left in the bag and the soul of Vitus made a dry rustling sound like an old leaf and simply blew away.

They continued to practice with arms, but now Rob was more thoughtful and not quite so eager.

He spent more time thinking about the gift, and he watched Barber and listened to him, learning whatever he knew. As he became familiar with ailments and their symptoms he began to play a secret game, trying to determine from outward appearances what bothered each patient.

In the Northumbrian village of Richmond they saw waiting in their line a wan man with rheumy eyes and a painful cough.

"What ails that one?" Barber asked.

"Most likely consumption?"

Barber smiled in approval.

But when it was the coughing patient's turn to see the barber-surgeon, Rob took his hands to lead him behind the screen. It wasn't the grasp of a dying person; Rob's senses told him that this man was too strong to have consumption. He sensed that the man had taken a chill and soon would be rid of what was merely pa.s.sing discomfort.

He saw no reason to contradict Barber; but thus, gradually, he became aware that the gift was not only for predicting death but could be useful in considering illness and perhaps in helping the living.

Incitatus pulled the red cart slowly northward across the face of England, village by village, some too small to have a name. Whenever they came to a monastery or church Barber waited patiently in the cart while Rob inquired after Father Ra.n.a.ld Lovell and the boy named William Cole, but n.o.body had ever heard of them.

Somewhere between Carlisle and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Rob climbed onto a stone wall built nine hundred years before by Hadrian's cohorts to protect England from Scottish marauders. Sitting in England and gazing out at Scotland, he told himself that his most likely chance of seeing someone of his own blood lay in Salisbury, where the Haverhills had taken his sister Anne Mary.

When finally they reached Salisbury, he received short shrift from the Corporation of Bakers.

The Chief Baker was a man named c.u.mmings. He was squat and froglike, not so heavy as Barber but fleshy enough to advertise his trade. "I know no Haverhills."

"Will you not seek them out in your records?"

"See here. It is fair time! Much of my membership is involved in Salisbury Fair and we are harried and distraught. You must see us after the fair."

All through the fair, only part of him juggled and drew and helped to treat patients, while he kept watch constantly for a familiar face, a glimpse of the girl he imagined she had grown to be.

He didn't see her.

The day after the fair he returned to the building of the Salisbury Corporation of Bakers. It was a neat and attractive place, and despite his nervousness he wondered why the houses of other guilds were always built more soundly than those of the Corporations of Carpenters.

"Ah, the young barber-surgeon." c.u.mmings was kinder in his greeting and more composed, now. He searched thoroughly through two great ledgers and then shook his head. "We've never had a baker name of Haverhill."

"A man and his wife," Rob said. "They sold their pastry shop in London and declared they were coming here. They have a little girl, sister to me. Name of Anne Mary."

"It's obvious what has happened, young surgeon. After selling their shop and before coming here, they found better opportunity elsewhere, heard of a place more in need of bakers."

"Yes. That's likely." He thanked the man and returned to the wagon.

Barber was visibly troubled but advised courage. "You mustn't give up hope. Someday you'll find them again, you will see."

But it was as if the earth had opened and swallowed the living as well as the dead. The small hope he had kept alive for them now seemed too innocent. He felt the days of his family were truly over, and with a chill he forced himself to recognize that whatever lay ahead for him, most likely he would face it alone.

15.

THE JOURNEYMAN.

A few months before the end of Rob's apprenticeship they sat over pitchers of brown ale in the public room of the inn at Exeter and warily discussed terms of employment.

Barber drank in silence, as if lost in thought, and eventually offered a small salary. "Plus a new set of clothing," he said, as if overcome by a burst of generosity.

Rob hadn't been with him six years for nothing. He shrugged doubtfully. "I feel drawn to go back to London," he said, and refilled their cups.

Barber nodded. "A set of clothing every two years whether needed or not," he added after studying Rob's face.

They ordered a supper of rabbit pie, which Rob ate with gusto. Barber tore into the publican instead of the food. "What meat I find is overly tough and stupidly seasoned," he grumbled. "We might make the salary higher. Slightly higher," he said.

"It is poorly seasoned," Rob said. "That's something you never do. I've always been taken by your way with game."

"How much salary do you hold to be fair? For a chap of sixteen years?"

"I wouldn't want a salary."

"Not have a salary?" Barber eyed him with suspicion.

"No. Income is gotten from sale of the Specific and treatment of patients. Therefore, I want the income from every twelfth bottle sold and every twelfth patient treated."

"Every twentieth bottle and every twentieth patient."

He hesitated only a moment before nodding. "These terms to run one year, when they may be renewed upon mutual agreement."

"Done!"

"Done," Rob said calmly.

Each of them lifted his mug and grinned.

"Hah!" said Barber.

"Hah!" said Rob.

Barber took his new expenses seriously. One day when they were in Northampton, where there were skilled craftsmen, he hired a joiner to make a second screen, and when they reached the next place, which was Huntington, he set it up not far from his own.

"Time you stood on your own limbs," he said.

After the entertainment and the portraits, Rob sat himself behind the screen and waited.

Would they look at him and laugh? Or, he wondered, would they turn away and go back to stand in Barber's line?

His first patient winced when Rob took his hands, for his old cow had trod upon his wrist. "Kicked over the pail, the b.i.t.c.hy thing. Then, as I was reaching to set it right, the cursed animal stepped on me, you see?"

Rob held the joint tenderly and at once forgot about anything else. There was a painful bruise. There was also a bone broken, the one that ran down from the thumb. An important bone. It took him a little time to bind the wrist right and fix a sling.

The next patient was the personification of his fears, a slim and angular woman with stern eyes. "I have lost my hearing," she declared.

Upon examination, her ears did not seem to be plugged with wax. He knew nothing that could be done for her. "I cannot help you," he said regretfully.

She shook her head.

"I CANNOT HELP YOU!" he shouted.

"THEN ASK TH'OTHER BARBER."

"HE CANNOT HELP YOU EITHER."

The woman's face had grown choleric. "BE d.a.m.nED TO h.e.l.l. I SHALL ASK HIM MYSELF."

He was aware both of Barber's laughter and the amus.e.m.e.nt of other patients as she stomped away.

He was waiting behind the screen, red-faced, when he was joined by a young man perhaps a year or two older than he. Rob restrained an impulse to sigh as he looked at a left forefinger in an advanced stage of mortification.

"Not a beautiful sight."

The young man was whitish in the corners of his mouth but managed a smile nevertheless. "I mashed it chopping wood for the fire all of a fortnight ago. It hurt, of course, but appeared to be mending nicely. And then ..."

The first joint was black, running into an area of angry discoloration that became blistered flesh. The large blisters gave off a b.l.o.o.d.y flux and a gaseous stink.

"How was it treated?"

"A neighbor man cautioned me to pack it with moist ashes mixed with goose s.h.i.t, to draw the pain."

He nodded, for it was a common remedy. "Well. It's now a consuming sickness that, if allowed, will eat into the hand and then the arm. Long before it gets into the body, you will die. The finger must come off."

The young man nodded gamely.

Rob allowed the sigh to escape. He had to be doubly certain; to take an appendage was a serious step, and this one would miss the finger for the rest of his life as he tried to earn his living.

He walked to Barber's screen.

"Something?" Barber's eyes twinkled.

"Something I need to show you," Rob said, and led the way back to his patient, the fat man following at a more labored pace.

"I've told him it must come off."

"Yes," Barber said, and the smile was gone. "That was correct. You wish a.s.sistance, chappy?"

Rob shook his head. He gave the patient three bottles of the Specific to drink and then carefully collected everything he would need, so he wouldn't have to go searching in the middle of the procedure or shout for Barber's help.